The Misbehavior of Organisms

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Breland/misbehavior.htm

THE MISBEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS
Keller Breland and Marian Breland (1961)
Animal Behavior Enterprises, Hot Springs, Arkansas
First published in American Psychologist, 16, 681-684.

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Interesting stuff!

I have seen similar things happen in my dog training. That some behaviours seem to be self-reinforcing.

Often it seems that instinctual behaviour is incredibly reinforcing! I wonder what to do about it without using aversives since some behaviour is very hard to manage. It certainly seems that if some behaviour is allowed to repeat itself the very fact that it is allowed to repeat itself it very reinforcing to the organism (in this case dog). So much so that no reward I can think of is more reinforcing.

One example is chasing birds. I thought perhaps I could use the Premack Principle on the bird-chasing (reward: allowed to sometimes chase birds on a variable schedual). Noch unfortunately has an incredibly strong prey drive so I resorted to managing the behaviour instead (keeping him on lead when we walk past birds). Perhaps I can use Premack later but right now it's not working at all -- he gets waaaaay to excited and cannot concentrate if he's allowed to chase them even once. All other learned behaviour breaks down for almost the whole walk after that.

Another one is barking. It seems if I ignore that, or try to teach incompatible behaviour (such as holding something in mouth) it still doesn't help (tries to bark with object in mouth). I have a friend whose dog will take and then spit out normally high-reinforcement treats to bark.

So far the I have been addressing the "managing" part of this situation. I have boiled the stimuli down to being noise reaction, anticipation and proximity (to stimulus). So baby gate has helped -- he can see people coming in but he is not so close (not seeing at all doesn't help -- he needs to see the people coming in to know what my desired behaviour is: being quiet and greeting ppl without jumping -- enthusisam is fine but making a sound or jumping is not good). This also enables me to use the opening of baby gate and letting him out to say hello as a reinforcer, together with ending up back behind the baby gate as negative reinforcement.

Barking, though, has een a slightly harder nut to crack. Here I have in fact resorted to using a water spray. But being quick to fade this out and instead take every opportunity to reward and even food reward silence. Progress so far! I do not know though, how I would have achieved silence to reward without the water spray.

occasionally resorted to using the water spray here *sigh*